Some practical experiences with water saving courses in adult education Report presented by Benno Bickel, Volkshochschule Schrobenhausen, on the occasion of the 5th meeting at UniversitÊ de Corse Pascal Paoli, Corsica, 6th – 13th April 2010.
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Dear members of our project, I am pleased to report to you about our activities at Schrobenhausen’s adult education centre “Volkshochschule Schrobenhausen” within the scope of “H2O-SMS – Water saving – Mankind saving”. This report consists of two parts. In the first part I’ll try to give you some information on the country-specific history and local background of our efforts and on the courses and workshops we performed. In the second part I’ll refer to a long time study we made for the purpose of evaluating our chances to target adults and their ecological awareness. As you will see, I am not very keen on using Powerpoint for presentations. Old-fashioned as I am, I fear that our world is more complex than a colourful mix-up of background colours, arrows and speech bubbles.
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It was in the early seventies of the 20th century that a new term spread like wildfire. It was the term “environment protection”, in German “Umweltschutz”. At that time – I will call it Phase I - the progressive pollution of water was more and more being aknowledged as a severe and threatening problem. In our little town Schrobenhausen, too. Especially in the night and early in the morning the river flowing through Schrobenhausen dazzled in various colours and was full of foam due to the waste water of the local paper mill. 1972 the adult school of Schrobenhausen invited me – at that time a student! - to give a lecture on local water pollution problems. I was foolish or simple-hearted enough to accuse the local paper mill of contaminating our river. After that incident I was forbidden to give any more lectures at the adult school for quite a lot of years. But times changed. In the seventies and eighties great efforts were made throughout Germany to
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protect water. The industry, the towns and even the smallest villages built sewage plants for cleaning waste water. The federal environment minister of those years took for the sake of publicity a bath in the Rhine. He wanted to demonstrate that it wasn’t any more the sewer of the chemical industry. In the nineties the term “sustainability” became popular. In this second phase many people, especially well educated members of the middle classes with ecological awareness started to save water. Within twenty years the daily water consumption per head in Germany decreased from 147 to 126 litres. Not bad, but not enough yet. There a lot of problems left. For instance: • The lavish use of precious deep water water in rock formations which needs centuries to regenerate • The threat of climate change
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• The political implications of the neoliberal attitude considering water as merchandise and not as public good • Water consumption in a globalised world What did we do in our adult education centre to cope with all these environmental challenges? Early in the nineties – meanwhile I was the headmaster of the school that had banned me from teaching 20 years ago – we started offering well attended courses and workshops about saving water in household and everyday life. These courses were very successful, especially as long as the focus was on technical solutions to save water. From 2000 on we offered courses in sustainable use of water, for example the segregation of drinking water and water for domestic use, e. g. toilets or gardening. The implementation of our corporate learning partnership “H2O-SMS – Water saving – Mankind
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saving” implicated new motivations in our efforts to offer courses dealing with this issue. In 1999 we established a string of lectures with a more theoretical approach: • Hydrological basics • Worldwide water supply • Worldwide water consumption • Worldwide water shortage and water quality • Water crisis, waterborne diseases • Water and the poor • Water privatisation versus water as public good • Water conflicts (e. g. Turkey and Syria; Israel and Palestine) • Water as a human right There were only a small, but very intrigued number of attendants. This year a further string of lectures will deal with “Virtual Water Concept”, which – in our opinion – is one of the most important ideas
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worthwhile to be disseminated in adult environmental education. The creator of the virtual water concept is Professor John Anthony Allan from King’s College London and the School of Oriental and African Studies. „Virtual water “measures how much water is embedded in the production and trade of food and consumer products”. For his contributions he was awarded the 2008 Stockholm Water Prize. Prof. Allan stated: "The water is said to be virtual because once the wheat is grown, the real water used to grow it is no longer actually contained in the wheat. The concept of virtual water helps us realize how much water is needed to produce different goods and services. In semi-arid and arid areas, knowing the virtual water value of a good or service can be useful towards determining how best to use the scarce water available." The picture of the 126 litres water per day consuming average German citizen becomes
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rather cloudy, if we make a statement that the same average German citizen consumes 4500 litres of virtual water a day!
There is a close connection between “Virtual Water” and the idea of the “Water footprint” as a special form of the “Ecological Footprint”. The water footprint is an indicator of water use that includes both direct and indirect water use of a consumer or producer. The water footprint of an individual, a community, a business or a country is defined as the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual or community or produced by the business. Water use is measured in water volume consumed, evaporated and/or polluted per unit of time. A water footprint can be calculated for any welldefined group of consumers (e.g. an individual, family, village, city, province, state or nation) or producers (e.g. a public organization, private enterprise or economic sector).
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This table shows the Water Footprint of some countries in cubic meters of water per head and year.
We will try to give our attendants some consciousness for these rather abstract issues with texts, graphics, pictures, presentations boards and multimedia. We will report our first experiences in the next and final meeting at Schrobenhausen in June. But we are not too optimistic regarding the response of our course participants. “Virtual water” is a subject requiring from the consumer a change of his behaviour and is cannot be dealt with comparatively easy technical solutions. This leads me to the second part of my report. Two years ago we completed a long term study on our ecological courses offered from 1991 to 2006 at our adult school. And I am happy to present you a very abridged summary of this study, because some of the results are also guidelines for our attempts in the context of our water project “H20-SMS”.
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I) We came to the conclusion that there is a statistically significant correlation between the number of attendants and changes completely beyond of our control. For instance: The German reunification caused a tremendous trend towards an economical instead of an ecological lifestyle. During the soap-bubble of „new economy“, we suffered from a very significant decline of attendants of ecology courses and subsequently had to reduce our offer. Increasing costs for energy and especially the new worldwide debate on climate change and global warming created a new batch of demand.
The financial crisis of 2009 again caused the demand for ecological courses to drop.
The fluctuations we encountered reflect the current political, economical, and social
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development. Due to our mass mediadominated post-modern society new movements don‘t need much time to spread and to reach our rural-coined area.
II) Over the years we also closely observed the gender-relation of ecological courses. In 1991 ecology was the only department having a majority of male participants. As you can see, the prominence of men vanished, and 2006 also our ecological courses were dominated by female attendants. It is not surprising that the fraction of female attendants prefer rather non-technical and down-to-earth attitude. This reflects the role allocation in a typical rural, rather traditional and conservative area like Schrobenhausen. Men traditionally prefer technically orientated courses for the handyman and home constructor:
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photovoltaic, thermal insulation and the domestic reuse of waste and rain water are topics predominantly demanded by males. Definitely technically orientated courses have their warranty, but there is a dangerous aspect to them: „handyman courses“ suggest that all our ecological problems can be solved by technological means.
III) Back to our project “H2O-SMS – Water saving – Mankind saving”: Instead of an abstract definition I do prefer to frame an utilitarian target, which is beneficial for our daily job: Ecological adult education has to communicate knowledge and to generate an existential orientation so that an attendant having to reach a practical or a political decision will hopefully make an ecological sustainable decision.
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We all are aware that it is a very delicate and demanding task to modify the behaviour of adults. Ecological education has to start early in kindergarten, nursery school and primary school – not to forget the parents’ responsibility from early childhood on. It is the business of adult education to build up basics or – probably in most cases without success - to compensate failures of the past. As I already emphasised, in the case of “Virtual Water” consumption there is no “magical device” to solve the problem by technical means. The only answer is: self-denial! Forgo all superfluous! But almost nobody wants to hear this message. Again and again we do offer courses about selfdenial. But these courses are our least attended ones. Nevertheless this global approach is one of the most important challenges we have to meet.
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We will not change this world, but we are doing our very best!